Recently, Seagate's flagship desktop Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB (ST31000340AS) units, are failing at an alarming rate and prompting outrage from their faithful customers.

A number of Seagate hard drives from the following families may fail when the host system is powered on:

Barracuda 7200.11
DiamondMax 22
Barracuda ES.2 SATA
SV35

Barracuda 7200.11

Barracuda ES.2 SATA

DiamondMax 22

A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue - it'll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won't be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there's power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting.

Seagate has diagnosed the problem and issued a new firmware to address it. However, drives that have already been affected can't have the firmware applied to them due to their locked-down status.

Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured through December 2008. Drive origin and firmware seem to be Thailand and SD15, but at least one user reports having had identical problems with a unit from the Wuxi(ng) fab and the SD35 firmware.


Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If you do, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive.

To help determine if you need to pursue this any further, you will need to check your model number, serial number and firmware revision. This can be done in Windows. Download and run the Seagate Drive Detect software program.

In the screenshot attached, the model number name is ST31500341AS, the serial number 9VS00J20 and firmware revision SD1A.

If you have one of the models listed above, Customers can expedite assistance by contacting Seagate via email. Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions.

Download

This post has been edited by cybpsych: Jan 18 2009, 12:26 PM


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seagate's serial number checker page is down --> "This application is temporarily unavailable."

my suggestion is to email Seagate for instructions/firmware ... seems that they haven't found a better tool/solution to inform users *properly* ... another way is to contact the local distributor only and put the pressure to them for replacement/exchange/firmware upgrade (?) etc. etc.

*mod, please move all discussion-related posts to its proper thread*